Not today, Mr. Wasp

I got stung by a wasp today. First time in about 30 years. It hurt like the dickens. And for a moment, it seemed my allergy might flare up again after three decades of dormancy. It didn’t. Mind over matter? Maybe. Or maybe my built-up immunity was just slow to the defense, having not been needed for so long.

First, a little about my history. As a child, I was prone to stings. For a few years, it seemed like I got it from a bee or a wasp at least once every summer. And when it happened, I swelled up big time. I can’t remember if it was my neck or cheek that got stung, but my whole face swelled. Both lips. And my eyes were almost swelled shut. When the puffiness went down, it seemed like I could see better. I remember watching a Popeye cartoon, wherein he got a swollen eye. And he said, “I can see clearer out of this eye. Ah-kuck-kuck-kuk.” I understood what he meant.

Another time, when my mother was a school bus driver, we were at the barn. She was off talking to one of the mechanics. I was on the grounds, playing with another driver’s son. We were 6, maybe 7 years old. Off to the side of the building, there was a lot of old equipment and discarded tires. Well, one of those tires must have been home to a wasp nest. When I stepped on it, I got swarmed. Four, five, maybe six stings.

I soon learned to be more careful around wasps. I managed to skip a couple of summers without incident. But once when I was 10, I picked up some paper trash that was in our yard. A bee was underneath, hanging around the clover. It got me on the back of the thumb. That whole hand swelled, and my right eye. That’s the thing about me and wasp/bee stings. I could get stung here and swell up there. But that was the last one for a long time. I do remember once when I was in my teens, a yellowjacket got me. Maybe it didn’t sting me that hard or it had no venom. The only effect was local itching.

However, from the time I was 11 through my teen years, another malady developed. Nasal stuffiness. It would start in late spring and go all through summer. Just the slightest irritation, and I would sneeze. Sometimes, I would sneeze relentlessly. If it happened in the morning, my nose would run a bit, but mostly I was stuffy. Usually until sometime in the afternoon. By 1 o’clock, I was good to go. Until the next day. One time, my mom took me to an allergist. I don’t remember getting a shot, but I probably did. And he told her to cut back on eggs and that I shouldn’t sleep on a pillow with feathers. Yeah, that was a thing when I was growing up. Goose down, I think.

The nasal allergies continued into adulthood. If I could get through a day without sneezing, I was okay. But once that first sneeze happened, look out. I should point out that I’m from Mississippi. The Deep South. The humidity here may be a factor. Not in the sneezing, but in the stuffiness. And I dealt with it after I joined the Navy and spent some time in southeast Georgia and northeast Florida. I learned to live with it.

Then, in the summer of 1983, I transferred to the West Coast. I drove. I left Jacksonville on a Friday and was home the next day. Stayed two weeks. And most mornings, I was miserable. The day I left for California, I was really in a bad way. I spent the first night in the Dallas area. Could hardly breathe at times. But on the next day, something happened. Somewhere west of Abilene, I cleared up. For the next 2 years, I had no issues. But then, in the fall of 1985, I transferred to Fallon, Nevada. The desert. Fall and winter was no problem. But spring?

The climate was dry. Southern California was relatively dry, but there were no known allergens in the Long Beach/Los Angeles area. But Fallon was loaded with them. Sagebrush. Tumbleweeds. Even when the mowers cut the grass. But with the lack of humidity, I didn’t get stuffy. I just had a relentlessly runny nose. Some days were so bad, I would feel the skin going raw from all the tissue I used. And it was the same thing. Sneeze, runny nose in the morning. Afternoon, I can breathe.

One day, I was at a video rental store and had to back off the transaction because I had an unexpected, early-evening sneeze. The owner, a man named Corky, told me there was a bee farm a few miles north of town. He suggested I get some honey. And what I should do is put a spoonful under my tongue and let it sit there. I’ve forgotten how long he said. But he could tell I wasn’t buying it. So he told me to go the nutrition store downtown. I did. I asked one of the attendants. Of course, she’s not gonna let me out of there without trying to sell me something. She showed me this concoction. A capsule with three ingredients. Crushed garlic, crushed cayenne pepper and something else I can’t remember. I took three at a time, once a day. They worked best when I took them during a meal. Relief! They worked. So I continued to buy a bottle every spring. Even when I came back to Mississippi in 1989, I went to the GNC store and got their equivalent. The stuff worked.

As far as nasal allergies go. Stings? Not so much.

One Sunday, I decided to hang laundry because the few items I had, it wasn’t worth going to the coin-op. When I went to bring the clothes in, a wasp crawled out from the horizontal pipe and got me on the thumb. Of course, my right eye swelled up. That one time as a child, both eyes got it. But on subsequent wasp stings, it was always the right eye. I went to the ER, got a shot. Was better the next day.

Then, a month or so later, I was working a temp job. The Uncle Ben’s (now Mars Food) rice plant shut down for maintenance. I was part of a crew that went out cleaning filters of rice hulls. I remember seeing a carpenter ant on the sleeve of one, got on my arm before I could free my hands and knock it off. It stung me. It was a slow kill. The next day, I started itching all over both arms and legs. And by the end of the week, I had those little pustules all over the place. The pain. The burning. The itching. I was like: This is ridiculous.

I went to the public library and picked up a couple of books about allergies. What an eye opener. First takeaway: people allergic to one thing are susceptible to being allergic to multiple things. Second takeaway: ants and wasps are a lot alike. Being allergic to wasp stings means I was vulnerable to ants, too.

The good news is I only had a couple more incidents over the next few years. Once, when I worked at the newspaper, we had this open field next to our building. And sometimes during breaks, a few of us would hang out under one of the shade trees. I was out there one day, when a co-worker said to watch my step. I was next to a fire ant mound. And sure enough, a few got on me, but I escaped with only some minor itching. A few spots where I was bitten on the back were lumpy for a few hours, but the swelling went down almost immediately. And a year or so later, I was leaving home. It was pleasant day, so I before I hit the highway, I drove with the window down. My arm hanging out. I saw the wasp as I was turning the corner, but before I could retract my arm, it got me on the elbow.

Hey! No swelling. Lots of pain where I got stung, and there was a localized knot. But I didn’t break out or having any other negative effects. Even better news. That was the last time I had any kind of issue. This was around 1995, give or take a year. A breakthrough. Could it be the knowledge gained from those library books affected my body’s reaction? I don’t know. What I do know is the following spring, when I was supposed to be taking my garlic-cayenne mix, I forgot to get a new bottle. When I realized I’d made it through April and May without getting stuffy or having a runny nose, I believed I was cured. Sure, to this day, I’ll have those episodes where I’ll sneeze for no apparent reason. Sometimes, one sneeze might trigger a multitude. When I get the first, “Bless you,” I tell people to save it. “They come in bunches.” And, yes, my nose sometimes runs, but not like it did in Nevada. Just enough to irritate me for having to blow or wipe. But not so much that it runs constantly. And when it does happen, it’s no more than 10 or 15 minutes. Not an entire morning.

Believing I was no longer allergic to stings, I got bold. Well, not foolish. Just bold. When I’ve seen a wasp inside the newsroom, for example, I would knock it down and kill it without fear. If my windows are down and one flies into my car, I’ll look for an opportunity to open a door and coax it out. If I see a nest along the eaves outside the house, if there’s one wasp, I’d shoo it away and destroy the nest. If there are no wasps, I’d destroy the nest.

And for several years, my wife would have me accompany her to her late mother’s house. Since the place was unoccupied by humans, insects made their homes. And usually, there would be two or three wasp nests on the porch. As long as there weren’t a lot of wasps around, I would use a garden tool to knock the nests down and fling them out into the yard.

All was quiet until today. My wife was doing something out back and discovered a wasp nest near a chair just outside our back door. Asked me to move the chair. She said the nest was inside a shoe. There were two shoes in the chair, but I didn’t see any wasps. So like a fool, I picked the dang thing up and started to move it. Oops. The nest wasn’t in either of THOSE shoes. There was a shoe on the slab behind where the chair was. A shoe that I stepped a little too close to. I counted at least eight wasps swarming around. One got me on the back of the hand. As Dr. Smith would say: Oh, the pain. It’s been six hours, and I’m still feeling it. It took more than a half hour to make it safe for her to come out. After the initial swarm, there were three or four that kept coming back to where the shoe was. To avoid a second sting, I had to pick my moments to try to use a broom handle to sling that shoe away from the house. And I used the water hose to douse the nest and all surfaces where the wasps that were still flying around tried to land. Eventually, they all cleared out, and I was able to get inside and wash the injury.

A few minutes after I came inside, it started. A little discomfort in my upper lip. And yes, it started to swell. And I kept thinking, no. Just no. I broke free 30 years or so ago. I’m not going back. But the discomfort persisted. After about an hour, it was back to normal. The pain on my hand had subsided. But there is no visible mark at the site of the sting.

Not today, Mr. Wasp. Not today.